Windows 7 first
look: More than just "Vista, fixed"
Posted by Ed Bott, July 29th, 2009
<http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1195>
Windows 7 won’t be officially available to the public until next
week—Thursday, August 6, to be exact—when MSDN and Technet subscribers
will finally get the chance to download the software legitimately and
activate their copies with product keys. It’s the first step on a long
rollout that will end October 22 when the software will be available
for purchase in retail boxes and on new PCs.
I’ve been able to get a head start, using the official RTM build
(7600.16385). For the past 10 days, I’ve been methodically installing
and testing the final release of Windows 7 on a wide range of desktop
and notebook configurations in my home and office. I’ve done upgrades
and clean installs, with and without the Easy Transfer utility, using
different editions in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. I’ll have a through
review of Windows 7 next week, including a deep dive into its most
interesting new features. Today, I want to offer some first impressions
and an image gallery based on my initial experience with these final bits:
<http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12354_22-325899.html>.
Windows 7 isn’t perfect, but it is greatly improved over its
predecessors in many ways. Calling it an “evolutionary” release in
comparison to Windows Vista is probably a fair characterization.
However, if you assume that Windows 7 is simply “Vista, fixed,” you’ll
miss many small but meaningful changes and several large ones that give
Windows 7 its own identity. In daily use, I continue to be impressed by
the attention to detail that went into the Windows 7 iterations of
features that are part of every Windows user’s daily routine. I’ve also
found some hidden gems, which I’ll spotlight here and in next week’s
full review.
[See my image gallery for a close-up look at key features and hidden gems in Windows 7 RTM
<http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12354_22-325899.html>]
From a design standpoint, Windows 7 makes the 2001-vintage XP design
look downright primitive. Switching between Vista and 7 is less
jarring, but the improvements in consistency and visual presentation
are still noteworthy and make 7 feel more graceful and modern. The
palette is softer, and many of the UI rough edges have been smoothed
out.
Arguably, the visual presentation is just eye candy. The more
important changes, as far as productivity is concerned, are those that
improve usability. When I switch from Windows 7 to a PC running an
earlier version of Windows (or, for that matter, running OS X or
Ubuntu), I miss some of the window management tricks that I’ve come to
rely on, including the ability to peek at thumbnails of open windows on
the taskbar and to “snap” windows into position with a flick of the
mouse.
Over several months of use, I’ve really come to appreciate Jump
Lists, which are pop-up menus that can be summoned with a right-click
on a taskbar icon (or, more easily, with a quick upward flick of the
mouse. The default Jump List for a program allows you to see a list of
recently used files and pin favorites to the menu.
I fully expect that some Windows veterans will grumble over a few of
the changes in Windows 7. In some cases, those are just different
approaches to design. In others, they reflect the Windows 7 learning
curve. As I’ve discovered after six months of intense research, some
new features take a while to adapt to. A few, like Libraries, which are
the new default file-organization scheme in Windows Explorer, are
deceptively complex and require some basic training before they can be
used to best advantage.
In terms of performance, Windows 7 feels quick and responsive. It’s
a solid performer even on hardware originally designed for Windows XP,
and I’ve found that it uses significantly less memory, disk space, and
CPU cycles than Vista. The Windows Experience Index, which was
initially intended as a marketing tool for Windows Vista, now does a
more through job of testing and reporting on your system’s capabilities
(more on that next week). One of my favorite new Windows 7 features is
Resource Monitor, which allows you to perform some serious real-time
sleuthing into running programs, services, and processes to see which
ones are affecting performance or making unexpected network connections.
When I’ve clocked startup and shutdown times, I’ve found them to be
similar to a well-tuned PC running Vista SP2. The most noteworthy
difference is a reduction in unexpected shutdown delays caused by a
process or program that refuses to surrender its hold on system
resources. Windows 7 does a much better job of bulling past those sorts
of obstacles. Sleep and resume operations seem faster and more reliable
on Windows 7 than on Vista; I’ll do some more controlled tests between
now and next week’s full review.
In terms of multimedia, the biggest news in Windows 7 is that it now
supports most popular audio and video formats. You can play back MP3
and WMA tracks as with previous Windows versions, but now you can also
use built-in Windows code to play unprotected music ripped and saved in
iTunes or purchased from the iTunes Music Store in AAC (M4A) formats.
You can also play movies captured by digital cameras in QuickTime Movie
format. Neither iTunes nor QuickTime is required for playback of either
format. Windows 7 also supports playback and streaming of video files
compressed with the popular H.264/AVC codec; however, it does not
natively support the popular Matroska (MKV) container format (DivX is
working on a solution that will add MKV support to Windows 7 via the Media Foundation framework: <http://labs.divx.com/mkvwin7preview>.)
Driver coverage was excellent across the board on virtually every
Windows 7 system I set up. Ironically, Windows 7 offered better driver
coverage than Vista, even on systems that were designed for use with
Vista. Missing drivers typically showed up via Windows Update, although
in the case of a Creative Labs soundcard I had to follow a link to
download a driver package. I’ll have more on some subtle driver-related
gotchas in next week’s review.
Several new features in Windows 7 are interesting more for their
potential than for what they actually deliver today The new Devices and
Printers folder, for example, offers a simplified view of user-managed
devices, with icons that a hardware maker can customize so the device
icon looks exactly like the physical device it represents. The
accompanying Device Stage interface for managing those devices offers a
user-friendly alternative to geeky dialog boxes, especially for
managing MP3 players, mobile phones, and printers (as in the example
shown here).
We won’t know until sometime after October 22 whether
and how quickly hardware makers will jump on this particular bandwagon.
Earlier, I mentioned hidden gems in Windows 7. One excellent example
is buried in the Sound Control Panel, where you might never notice it.
Plug an external device into your sound card’s input jack (Microphone
or Line In, for example) and you’ll see a new Listen tab that allows
you to direct that input to an output device. Using this feature, you
can play your portable music player through your PC speakers without
requiring any additional software. (You can see the user interface for this feature in the image gallery: <http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12354_22-325899-10.html>.)
The first wave of reviews for any new operating system always
overemphasize the ease of use (or lack thereof) in the setup and
upgrade process. That’s only natural, especially in this case, because
of the pent-up demand for an XP replacement that isn’t Vista. Over
time, the overwhelming majority of people will get a new version of
Windows with a new PC and won’t have to deal with setup issues, but
it’s a big deal for upgraders and enthusiasts.
On modern hardware (dual- or quad-core CPU, fast hard disk), I found
clean install times consistently under 30 minutes. Copying the setup
files to a bootable hard drive or USB flash drive cuts about 10 minutes
off the setup time. Upgrades took an average of an hour or so. The most
recent upgrade, over an installation of Windows Vista Home Premium on a
Hewlett-Packard small-form-factor PC used as a Media Center PC in the
living room, was almost effortless. Every installed program worked with
no modification. The only manual change I had to make was to replace
the included Nvidia driver with the complete package from Nvidia’s
website, so that I could adjust the image size on the HDTV to which
it’s connected.
One
of the most welcome changes in Windows 7 is its backup and restore
program, which now offers virtually the same feature set in all
editions. You can make a system image backup using any edition, even
the lowly Windows 7 Starter, and restore the image in just a few
minutes. I was especially impressed with how easy it was to restore a
system from an image backup saved on a portable hard drive. The
recovery utility offered to do a data backup, then rebooted itself and
restored my fully customized saved installation in less than 15
minutes. (I’ll have a much more detailed look at this feature next
week.)
In an earlier post (and accompanying image gallery <http://content.zdnet.com/2346-12354_22-287837-1.html>), I spotlighted the Windows Easy Transfer utility <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=815>,
which migrates data files and settings for Windows and many popular
programs from an old Windows installation to a new one. For anyone
upgrading from Windows XP, it’s literally the only way to go (short of
third-party software). As part of the migration from RC to RTM on my
main desktop system, I used Windows Easy Transfer, which did a flawless
job moving data files and was surprisingly effective with program
settings. Reinstalling programs is a tedious process, but the Windows
Easy Transfer report made it much easier by providing a checklist and
download links for most of the software installed on my old PC.
I’ve written a couple of recent posts discussing what’s in the different editions of Windows 7 <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1031>, with an especially close look at the default consumer version, Windows 7 Home Premium <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1128>.
I’ve used all four retail editions over the past 10 days in a variety
of roles, including the much-maligned Starter edition. I’ll have more
on those differences next week. I’ve also been switching between 32-bit
(x86) and 64-bit (x64) Windows versions with no real impediments. In
fact, in normal use it’s almost impossible to tell which version is
running without consulting system tools. One of the biggest concerns
I’ve heard from people considering an x64 upgrade is whether they’ll
find support for hardware and software they use. My experience says
that the majority of people will have a smooth 64-bit upgrade.
Overall, this flurry of OS installs has made me appreciate Windows 7
even more than I did during earlier rounds of the beta cycle. I’m
looking forward to putting together a detailed look at the final
product next week.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two
decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online
publications.
Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive Inc.
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